Electronic Arts is by far the most successful third-party publisher today.  Not only is it the lone computer game publisher to survive the Golden Age (1979 - 1992) still controlling its own fortunes, but those fortunes have surpassed all others in the industry, routinely making over one billion dollars each year.  In fact, several classic publishers are now wholly owned subsidiaries of Electronic Arts including:  Origin, Maxis, Westwood Associates and Bullfrog.  EA's success over the years was built upon a huge library of great games .  This can be seen by the large number of GOTCHA nominations and winners listed below.  EA is second in number only to SSI, whose dominance of the  niche wargame market skews the numbers in their favor.  Excluding wargames, Electronic Arts has garnered  the most GOTCHA nominations and wins of any publisher.  One  of the keys to EA's continued success over the Golden Age is the company's policy of giving credit and profit where it was due.  This was a new concept in an industry where developers were often treated more like factory workers than artists. 

History

In 1982, Trip Hawkins left Apple Computer, where he served as Product Marketing Director.  Hawkins developed the principal ideas behind the foundation of EA during a period from 1965-1982.  His key ideas were validated in a visit with Don Valentine of Sequoia Capital in February, 1982.  Valentine invited Hawkins to use his office to incubate the company and showed a strong interest in investing after Hawkins wrote a business plan. The early relationship with Valentine resulted in a first -- a video game company making venture capital part of its startup strategy.  According to Hawkins, the principal ideas and year of instigation leading up to the formation of Electronic Arts are as follows:

Hawkins incorporated his company alone (but with the assistance of a lawyer) on May 28, 1982 and was the sole owner of the company for several months.  He did research for the business plan prior to August 1982 and then spent most of August writing the plan with Rich Melmon doing a small portion of the writing.  The first draft of the plan was presented to Sequoia in early September, 1982 and received positive feedback, at which point they began negotiating terms.  The financing was finally closed in early December.  Hence the company entirely depended on Hawkins financially for the first seven months -- estimated to cost him around $200,000.

The name by which the company was known actually changed many times.  For the first several years that Hawkins worked on ideas, it had no  name because one wasn't needed until it shipped some actual products.  When first incorporated, the legal name was Amazin Software.  During that time Hawkins was already doing contracts with people like Dan Bunten (M.U.L.E.) , David Maynard (Worms?), and Freefall Associates (Archon), and that was when things really got going with funding, office space, employees, and products in development. 

Employee #1 was obviously Trip Hawkins. The first "other" employees were Melmon, Dave Evans, and Pat Marriott who were hired in August, 1982.  One reason they were hired first is that Hawkins knew all of them previously, and they took his first offer to join.  Joe Ybarra and Stephanie Barrett were hired in early September. Hawkins only met them in that time period, which is why they did not join sooner.  After they were hired, the budding game publisher had outgrown the small space they had at Sequoia and had to move in October to their own office in Burlingame (that overlooked the landing path at the San Francisco airport), and later to San Mateo in January 1983.  The final business plan, published on October 8, 1982 says that Bing Gordon, EA's current (2005) Chief Creative Officer and Executive Vice President, was scheduled to be hired in October but did not say he had already been hired.  His actual hire date is somewhere between late September and late October when he started in the Burlingame office.  He joined the company later in part because he could not make up his mind and in part because his wife was trying to convince him to join GBS instead in the formation of their new ad agency. Hawkins recalls that even in late September he was out in San Francisco walking the streets with Gordon trying to convince him to join.  A year later Hawkins once again had to go to great lengths to convince him not to jump ship.  Tim Mott joined in October and proposed the hiring of Steve Hayes and Dave Maynard who came in around late October or early November, as did Jeff  Burton.

In summary, the earliest EA employees were:

The initial employees of Amazin' Software hated that name, so they held an all-day company naming session off-site in Pajaro Dunes in October, 1983.  Andy Berlin and Jeff Silverstein of GBS ad agency also joined the naming portion of the meeting.  The name on the cover of the business plan final draft (dated October 8, 1982) is actually "SoftArt," which is a name that Melmon and Hawkins had devised. But they personally knew the people that ran Software Arts (creators of Visicalc), respected them and did not want to use the SoftArt name unless it was okay with them. Melmon asked Dan Bricklin of Software Arts, and the response was negative.  Hawkins wanted a company that embraced the artistic vision behind the film company, United Artists, a firm founded by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, et al.  Bing Gordon proposed "Electronic Artists," but Steve Hayes countered, "We're not the artists, they are..." meaning that EA was a publisher and not a developer.  (In fact, EA's first in-house game was Skate or Die produced in 1987.)  Tim Mott proposed "Electronic Arts", and previously they all agreed that the name would only change with a unanimous vote, and if anyone went to bed, they lost their vote.  Only Marriott went to bed and the unanimous vote for Electronic Arts was around 2 AM.

Ironically, EA later created a short-lived, budget line of games for the C-64 called "Amazing Software."  These games were imports from around the world.

Also ironic, when EA opened its first European office in 1987, another company was called Electronic Arts in Europe, and the publisher could not use that name.  Instead, they called the corporate entity EOA Limited...until Hawkins was able to make a deal in 1988 to acquire the name from the European EA (a small graphics service firm).  Similarly, it took a long time for the publisher to become known as EA.  For example, the first sports product was Hawkins' personal project, One on One, which was released in 1983 as an Electronic Arts game.  Several more sports products followed until EA decided to brand them around EASN, the EA Sports Network.  That was later changed to EA Sports.  It wasn't until 2000 that EA formally changed all of its branding around "EA" -- EA Games, EA Sports, EA Big, etc.

EA's original business goals (according to the 1982 business plan) were to grow to a billion dollar company in about 6 years, and to "make software that makes a personal computer worth owning." Electronic Arts was the 136th game publisher in the US., but the first to reach the billion-dollar goal (although it actually took 12 years).

Some of EA's original strategies were:

In May of 1983 EA shipped:

All 21 or so EA employees went to the warehouse for the day and packed boxes. Other long-time employees who participated were Sharon Haug (then finance, later sales operations) and David Gardner.

Later that summer EA shipped:

Murder on the Zinderneuf was actually contract #1 at EA, and Archon was contract #2 (though they were signed the same afternoon).  Archon made the initial release date in May, but Zinderneuf was shipped a month later, in June of 1983.

By depending heavily on the Atari 800 and Apple II platforms, Electronic Arts nearly put itself out of business.  The Atari 800 sales never took off as they had hoped, and Apple didn't give enough support to games. Commodore shipped the 64 disk drive in September of 1983 and jumped into the lead in the computer gaming market.  EA devoted much of its resources to porting its best titles to the C-64 and had five games converted by Thanksgiving of 1983, saving the company.

After a very successful run on home computers, Electronic Arts later branched out and produced console games as well.  Trip Hawkins moved on to found the 3DO company.  However, these are stories for a site other than GOTCHA.

As a side note, EA's classic Cube/Sphere/Pyramid corporate logo was devised by Barry Deutsch of the Steinhilber, Deutsch & Gard design firm . They proposed the three shapes to stand for the "basic alphabet of graphic design," and they rasterized them to connote technology.  Budd Steinhilber who was President of the San Francisco based design firm told GOTCHA that "In 1983 our old friend Rich Melmon (who we'd previously worked with at Intel and VisiCorp) asked us to design the logo, stationary and packaging for Rich & Trip's new venture.  The original logotype was designed by my partner Barry Deutsch. What you call "rasterization" is a technique used to suggest light & shadow in line art. Incidentally, when the first batch of business cards was printed, each individual had a choice of having either a cube, sphere or pyramid symbol on their card. Something for psychologists to interpret?"  About a year later, ATT unveiled a similar treatment in their logo.

Nancy Fong and Bing Gordon came up with the idea to hide the three shapes on the game covers, borrowing the idea from the way Playboy hid their bunny symbol on their magazine covers. 

Hawkins came up with the idea for the "flat boxes" (album cover packaging) "because I both wanted to save money and to have a look-and-feel of music-style sophistication and artist promotion.  What was a pleasant surprise was that once GBS was given this assignment they executed on it really well and were able to get the worlds largest printer of album covers to do something even better that was smaller, customized for our floppy discs, and in fact cheaper than a regular music LP album.  I asked them to knock themselves out on the PCS [Pinball Construction Set] cover and they did, and I think their work on that one set the tone.  I kept track and counted 22 competitors that went to the same printer and used the same album format that we pioneered.  However we later had to drop it because with increasingly crowded shelf space the albums got turned sideways ('spined out') and were too thin to see the brands.  At that point we began thickening the albums into boxes."

-- This summary was based on e-mail interviews with Trip Hawkins and Bing Gordon with additional information provided by Jon Freeman of Epyx and Free Fall Associates fame and Barry Deutsch of the Steinhilber, Deutsch & Gard design firm.  GOTCHA would like to sincerely thank all of these gentlemen for their time and powers of recollection.   In cases of conflicting information, GOTCHA generally went with the information provided by  founder, Trip Hawkins since he has a copy of the business plan handy to  back up his memories.

Also visit GOTCHA's tribute to EA Flat Boxes and the EA Flat Box Photo Gallery.

GOTCHA Nominees

GOTCHA Winners

One on One: Dr. J vs. Larry Bird -- Electronic Arts, 1983

Archon -- Electronic Arts, 1983

M.U.L.E. -- Electronic Arts, 1983

The Seven Cities of Gold -- Electronic Arts, 1984

Racing Destruction Set -- Electronic Arts, 1985

Wasteland -- Electronic Arts, 1986

Lords of Conquest -- Electronic Arts, 1986

Earl Weaver Baseball -- Electronic Arts, 1987

Skate or Die -- Electronic Arts, 1987

Chuck Yeager's Advanced Flight Trainer -- Electronic Arts, 1987

Project Firestart -- Electronic Arts, 1988

Centurion - Electronic Arts, 1990

4-D Boxing -- Electronic Arts, 1991

Games in the GOTCHA Museum 

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Last modified: February 20, 2004

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